Several years ago with SQL Server 2008 R2 I achieved 200,000+ simple queries per second (http://bit.ly/IlH2id -- this is not a regimented benchmark by any measure of the imagination, but is only saying "validate before assuming" because you might find your install performs far better than you anticipate) using the standard TDS query interface. This was on pretty beefy hardware, and is obviously enormously contingent on the data being in memory (which you can force with 2012), however it blew me away and completely undermined an initiative we had to implement AppFabric / Redis or other solutions.